April 1, 2020

Give & Get Employer Branding: Bryan Adams and Charlotte Marshall

Charlotte Marshall and Bryan Adams teamed up for their new book, Give & Get Employer Branding. Here, these employer brand industry leaders pull together their expertise to redefine the concept of employee value proposition.

In this book, they will demonstrate how to harness the values to be found within your company in order to draw forward the candidates who are most likely to thrive and truly add to your culture and success.

Nikki Van Noy: Today, I’m joined by two authors, Bryan Adams and Charlotte Marshall who came together to write Give & Get: Employer Branding.

Bryan, Charlotte, welcome.

Charlotte Marshall: Hi Nikki.

Bryan Adams: Hi.

Nikki Van Noy: Let’s start, I’ll give each of you a chance to answer this by sharing with listeners a little bit about each of your backgrounds and also how you came together to write this book.

Charlotte Marshall: I always love telling the story, so Bryan, I’m going to jump in first. My background is on the practitioner side and I’ve been working inside Fortune 500 companies for the last 15 years. In the early days as a best kept secret and now, a widely spreading role which is that of an employer brand practitioner helping companies brand themselves as a great place to work. Along that journey, I have worked with a lot of different agency partners and I actually ended up hiring Bryan several years ago to help me change the way I approach my work to solve some challenges I had encountered time and time again.

The philosophy that is the premise of this book that Bryan shared with me has changed the way I approached my work so fundamentally and so drastically that we chatted about writing a book and sharing it more broadly with the world.

Nikki Van Noy: What a testament, no pressure Bryan.

Bryan Adams: Well, what can I add to that? You know, I’ve been doing this for a number of years, always believed that our approach was super effective and very aware it was different than how it’s conventionally approached in the industry. It was interesting because when we met Charlotte, she was seen as one of the most authoritative figures, if you like, and experienced employer brand leaders around so obviously we were so pleased to see such a reception.

I think it’s fair to say that we also learned a hell of a lot about how to work with empathy with our corporate partners, and what it means to actually deliver this type of work in corporate America. The learning we took and the improvements we could then make to our philosophy to make it more effective and practical.

It just seemed to be a really good idea to bring those two things together to change the employer brand industry philosophically but also bring a tactical lens and a practical means of doing this with efficiency and even more effectiveness.

Nikki Van Noy: You guys have all your bases covered, in other words, it sounds like.

Charlotte Marshall: You don’t often hear the two perspectives at once and I think that’s what I was most excited to partner on this initiative with Bryan because you’ll hear agency voices like Bryan at conferences and in podcasts and you’ll hear practitioners.

You know, the saying two heads are better than one is actually the two perspectives combining to create a new way, that’s the most exciting thing that we’ve stumbled across.

Nikki Van Noy: That makes sense. Charlotte, you mentioned something that I wanted to ask about which was that when you started doing this work, employer branding was sort of a secret in the background and now, it’s out front. Can you talk to me about what that shift has been and where we’re at now?

Charlotte Marshall: It’s been the most incredible, unexpected career journey. Everyone who comes into employer branding comes from a different profession because it is still not something you can study or learn in school along the way.

In the early 2000s, I was working in an internal employee communication capacity and I always worked for very large global companies that had at least 10,000 employees. As these challenges emerged with talent attraction, engagement and retention, I was sort of that natural person to tap and started to get exposed to this line of work.

I didn’t have any peers or I didn’t know anyone else really in the world that was doing the work I was doing. Some of my learnings and my successes and my failures were all held pretty tightly and over the last, I’d say, three to five years, the explosion and interest and development creation of the roles has been really inspiring. I looked on LinkedIn earlier last year and saw 21,000 people in the US added employer branding as one of their skillsets.

Nikki Van Noy: Wow.

Attracting the Right People

Charlotte Marshall: This community has got 20 plus thousand members now that are actively engaging in employer branding and recruitment marketing. I think the shift in the market has really led to unemployment that is at an all-time low, less than 2% in the US, and even the very best brands in the world fight for the same people to work for them. If you think of the top engineers coming out of the university or even in the world, the Amazons, the Googles, the Apples, they all fight for that same person. So, we’ve seen this emphasis shift from branding your products and services to more talking about the people behind the brand or what makes you unique and special so that you can win more than your fair share of top talent.

Nikki Van Noy: It’s really interesting, just to think about how much the climate has changed in this way from a decade ago until now.

Charlotte Marshall: No one’s more surprised than Bryan and myself.

Nikki Van Noy: The things I love, when I look at books is when I see information that seems counter-intuitive to me. Your book has one of those elements. You talk about how the most effective employers don’t actually attract candidates, but they repel them. Talk to me about what you mean by this?

Bryan Adams: It’s interesting, it takes people by surprise because I think, this is still an industry in its infancy. It’s born out of organizations having to do something about the fact that the talent market is becoming more competitive, so the natural instinct is, we need to get more magnetic and we need to start attracting more people towards our organization.

A few years ago, there was a phrase that was on every conference and stage in the industry around that recruiters need to think more like marketers. That’s exactly what’s happened to fill the space of employer branding.

Conventional and traditional marketing frameworks have been adopted and pulled over and into the space, where organizations have tried to attract more people towards their organization but what’s happened is as a net result, recruitment teams are being overwhelmed by an incredible number of applicants, and candid experience has suffered because of that.

The culture fit or culture match has suffered as a consequence. We’re now in a place where it’s not more about attracting people towards your organization in terms of volume, it’s much more about attracting the right people towards your organization that are going to find a sense of purpose, a sense of impact, and a sense of belonging.

You know, it sounds counterintuitive, but actually, all we’re doing really is addressing the fundamental basic human curiosities, that people want to satisfy when they’re deciding whether to apply for a role in an organization or not. We’re just giving them all of the information that they’re looking for so they can make better-informed decisions.

We’ve spoken to a lot of people researching the concept of this book and they validated our approach that we have been using in the agency for more than a decade.

Charlotte Marshall: It’s one of those things that you learn from doing it for the first time and there are so many companies investing in hiring employer brand leaders. You’re going to uncover this as you activate your brands and it’s really what led me to hiring Bryan years ago. The brand I had developed prior took over 18 months to develop and over a million dollars and it was deemed a huge success, one of the most measurable case studies on employer brand ROI at the time.

Yet, what we ended up doing was absolutely flooding our funnels with application volume because candidates were simply seduced with the sizzle of this large brand they had never heard of, now advertising themselves as a stellar place to work.

When I joined the next company, I knew this was something I wanted to approach differently to impact the quality of applicant coming in, reducing volume, but I didn’t know how. It’s nice to be able to share with people before they encounter that challenge, some ways that they could mitigate against it.

Nikki Van Noy: This all makes perfect sense. Basically, what you’re doing is refining your candidate pool before you even start.

Charlotte Marshall: Yes.

Bryan Adams: Yeah, that’s right. I read the other day that in a couple of years’ time, millennials will officially be running the world, and I think we’re in a generation now where people are a little bit more cynical. It takes a lot more for a person to believe a brand message. Advertising and marketing are getting much harder.

Actually, this is just a race towards real authenticity and transparency. That’s what we’re offering our industry. The net result is candidates and employees are getting a much more well-rounded reality of the employee experience. So, candidates can make a more informed decision and employees can feel acknowledged and appreciated. They’re much more likely to identify and engage with a brand that they believe in.

Purpose, Impact, and Belonging

Nikki Van Noy: I want to dive into the things that candidates today are most looking for that come into consideration here, but I’d like to start by looking at the cross-section, if there is one, between more overall product and company branding and employer branding. What’s the relationship there?

Bryan Adams: The relationship is they are two sides of the same coin and essentially, they need to be in synergy. The foundational layer of values, guiding principles, philosophy, in the sense of purpose for the overall brand needs to be rock solid and aligned across the board, just like traditional marketing. We have one product, but we might have a different message to satisfy different segments of the audience.

An employer brand serves a different purpose, it’s just getting real about what the function of employer branding is for and what it’s designed to do. That’s really giving an insight into the people behind the brand.

All of our research and all of the insights that we have ever gleaned from all of the global brands that we work with, typically, boil down to three derivative buckets that I mentioned earlier, the sense of purpose, the sense of impact, and the sense of belonging. And then, it’s a case of articulating it in a very unique way, to realistically reflect what it’s really like to work in an organization.

The sentiment and the affinity that you can achieve from that sort of communication needs to feel authentic and it needs to feel in line with the branding messages that you might find on a consumer side. Interestingly enough, what we do find is the messages and the activation of employer brand really translates and crosses the line over into consumer marketing because, people do want to know that those coffee beans have been ethically sourced, the sneakers that you’re wearing have been manufactured in a sustainable manner.

This is just part of the world now where people are making informed choices from a consumer point of view, as well as where to work. We’ve also done work in the past where we’ve seen if candidates are being treated poorly, having a negative candidate experience, some of those candidates are customers of that brand. We work with Virgin and found that their candidate experience was not where it needed to be, and of 120,000 applicants a year, actually, 18% of those candidates were customers, 6% of those were having such a poor experience, they were going home, canceling their Virgin contract and moving over to a competitor.

Nikki Van Noy: Not good. Wow.

Bryan Adams: That was costing five million dollars a year and Virgin at the time had no idea that was happening. That was a first case study, the first business case of the importance in the space.

Nikki Van Noy: Virgin strikes me as particularly interesting in this way because I think that’s a company that most of us have a really good impression of. It’s interesting that this part of their business was not up to snuff.

Bryan Adams: Well, if you think about it, if the employer brand and the consumer brand are operating hand-in-hand and at the same level, then a consumer applying for a job has super high expectations because of the expectations set from a consumer side. You know, the person doesn’t know that they’re having a candidate experience or a customer experience, they’re just having a brand experience.

The consistency is essential.

Nikki Van Noy: That makes sense.

Charlotte Marshall: That’s one of my favorite stories because what Bryan left out is that within twelve months after doing some candidate experience journey mapping and campaigning, they turned the talent acquisition function into a revenue generator for Virgin.

Nikki Van Noy: Wow, impressive. Talk to me about what changed in those twelve months? You mentioned the candidate journey was part of that.

Bryan Adams: Yeah, to their credit, they were measuring the candidate experience and their MPS was minus 29, I think. We mapped every branded touchpoint of that, we looked at every branded moment, and also the moments between the moments, the sort of periods of contemplation that people were left thinking about the brand. We identified what people were thinking, how they’re feeling, how easy it is to progress, what are the memorable moments.

Then we designed an experience that was positive with less friction, more memorable, and essentially with more empathy for the audience. As a result, that took the MPS score to a positive figure, and at that point, that’s when, if you’re delighting candidates or customers, they’re receptive to building an affinity with the brand and possibly those who aren’t customers might think better of them for the experience and refer other people to apply for jobs and maybe even buy their products.

Charlotte Marshall: You’re leaving out the best parts–Usain Bolt.

Bryan Adams: Yeah, one of the moments of magic was Usain Bolt. I don’t know whether he’s still an ambassador for the brand, but we managed to convince Usain to record some footage for us relating his approach to training, preparation, and competitiveness. The day before an interview, the candidate would receive a video from him saying, “Hey, life’s all about preparation, give it your best shot and good luck.”

That’s a great example of how to use the branded assets from a consumer side to delight your customers–your candidates on the employer brand side.

Nikki Van Noy: That’s so cool. Thank you, Charlotte for not letting Bryan leave that part out there.

Charlotte Marshall: The other one, the BS bingo is my personal favorite.

Bryan Adams: Yeah, the cut the quack. I think it’s live as well. The employer brand for Virgin was built on fun, generous, and supportive, so everything we did for Virgin had to center around those three things. We built a talent acquisition that you could cut and paste your CV or your LinkedIn profile into cut the quack, and it replaced all the cliché words with ducks so you could shoot, and it replaced the duck with better English. It was fun, it was generous and supportive and what we set out to do is make the candidate a better candidate for the experience, whether they got the job or not.

Living up to the Virgin brand, it was a lot of fun, it was highly shareable. That was a really cool project. We really enjoyed working with Virgin, they were great.

Nikki Van Noy: I mean, I am paranoid about flying so I’m a horrible candidate for that company but just hearing about that makes me want to apply just to have the experience. I love that.

Bryan Adams: It was a lot of fun.

Authenticity

Nikki Van Noy: A word that’s come up a couple of times now is authenticity, which I would love you guys to speak to. I’m particularly interested in this idea of authenticity in the context of culture because obviously, culture has become king for so many candidates today and I feel like so many companies are advertising this culture that almost has started to sound, it almost sounds packaged, because everyone is interpreting culture the same way. I’d love to get your thoughts on that.

Charlotte Marshall: One of the things we like to joke about in the industry is before they give in and get, when employer branding was starting to take hold of everybody’s attention, if you went to our career website, you would very quickly encounter what we were like to work with on our very best day.

It’s definitely the truth that the positive end of the truth is shown and, a lot of times, we’re holding back the stuff that we think candidates would be less than excited to find out about. What we see is candidates going in droves to review sites like Glassdoor. We joke that’s where you go to find out what we’re like on our worst day.

Because on those sites it is typically disgruntled employees going to leave a less than stellar review about a company. Bryan and I actually chatted about this quite a bit and we said, “Is it because candidates feel like we won’t tell them the truth? That they can’t get the truth from us? Is that why Glassdoor sold for billions of dollars and has become this phenomenon in our experience? What if we owned the truth? What’s the worst that would happen?”

Will some people pass us up because they might say, “That’s not for me, I could never endure a culture that was consensus-driven, for example, because it would take forever to get anything done,” or they might respect us for telling the truth. Even if they didn’t end up choosing us, they might leave with a positive impression and we just saved ourselves the time and expense of putting someone forward but also, we can thrive within our cultural reality.

Bryan Adams: It is interesting because authenticity is used so much in our space and so much in advertising and marketing, but it’s got to be more than the authentic truth about the strengths, the benefits and the opportunities within an organization. It is much more than just being more truthful about an organization on its worst day. We are actually missing out on a huge opportunity to elicit an incredible wealth of pride and passion within an organization by not leaning into the harsh realities of any organization.

We always say, as well, your brand of difficult is what makes you different. So, if you can take an employer brand tagline or headline and you can put that above any of your competitors and it would ring true, then frankly, you are just not digging deep enough and working hard enough to define what makes your organization unique.

Imagine the Navy SEAL’s, for example. There is a thing called hell week. In order to get into the Navy SEAL’s you have to get through this hell week and it sounds exactly what it is. It sounds like hell on earth, but people don’t travel across America to San Diego to apply for the Navy SEAL’s despite hell week. They do it because of hell week. Once they get into the Navy SEAL’s, the reason they walk around with that badge on their chest with so much pride is because of what it stands for.

So, if your employer brand doesn’t stand for something, you are missing out on an opportunity to elicit incredible pride and respect. By leaning in and talking openly about the harsh realities within an employee experience, you are missing out on an opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate the real hard work that your rising stars and top performers are putting in day in and day out and still thriving within your organization.

If you have that more honest well-rounded conversation about the employee experience, that is how to get true advocates who are passionate and willing to share their story. And hopefully, attract more like-minded people through a good culture match that can add value to your organization. So, it just makes great business sense to follow this line of thinking.

Charlotte Marshall: It is not just applying the two things in isolation, there is this formulaic approach. I think the most inspiring part for me to discover in going on this journey with Bryan and building a brand based on those principles was candidates don’t expect things to always be sunny. They know that times are going to get hard and they’re actually craving more information about what it’s going to feel like when it does.

Despite there being a harsh reality at every organization in the world it is not a negative for everybody. There is a reason or a benefit that someone gets in exchange for that side of a culture. Watching Bryan work and iterate and have these conversations in different workshops is really inspiring because you ask people what is it like here on the worst day? I’ve heard him say, “You know if it was your job to convince a candidate not to accept a job here and you couldn’t lie, what would you say?”

And really quickly, you start to get this weird looks dashing across the room like, “Can I say it, do I say it?” But something comes through. I have done this exercise on stage a number of times and it comes to people’s minds quite quickly and you can uncover what those harsh realities are. Then you say, “All right, so you deal with that perhaps day in and day out. Why? Why do you stick around? What do you get in return for that? Why is it worth it? Why is the juice worth the squeeze?” And that is where you start to find some real magic that the give and get can help to encapsulate to make it easy for candidates to understand your experience.

Nikki Van Noy: That makes so much sense. Looking at this as a job seeker, I mean we all know after our first job generally that there are going to be these bad days at a company. It seems to me like there would be a lot of comfort in knowing what that would look like and choosing that as opposed to not knowing exactly what sort of culture you are looking into outside of the kombucha on tap. In your book, you guys talk about creating a smart filter. Explain to me what that is.

Bryan Adams: The smart filter is essentially using a set of brand messages or a two-way proposition to allow candidates to self-select out. So rather than just be attractive based on the positive fun side, and the opportunity to be found within an organization, it is giving that well-rounded more grounded truth about a company including the obstacles and challenges to be found. Depending on the mindset, if you present a challenge or an obstacle or a harsh reality to be found within your organization, some people will look at that obstacle with a mindset that’s, “Wow that is too big for me to climb over. I don’t want to take on that challenge” and they move on.

Somebody else maybe with the same competency and the same experience might look at it and say, “Is that big enough for it to be worthwhile for me to commit to and how am I going to feel when I get on the other side?” They are looking for a sense of being able to really make an impact on an organization. They relish that challenge.

They are the type of people that you want to carry on in that process. If you put your audience to those types of decisions, then naturally they’re going to self-select in or self-select out. The fact is, the biggest difference between what we are doing and marketing is 99% of your audience is not going to be successful. You know you can’t give everybody a job, whereas in marketing, you’ll sell everybody the product if they show interest. So that is the idea of the smart filter. We are not trying to get more people to apply to your organization, but trying to get more of the right people.

Nikki Van Noy: That makes sense. Is there anything you guys see that somewhat chronically companies tend not to think through or not to think through correctly, for lack of a better word, when it comes to employer branding?

Charlotte Marshall: I’d say two come to mind. The first is this broadcast–this one-way value proposition that broadcasts strengths and we have a chapter in the book that talks about why this came to be. As employer brand started, none of us knew how to do it. We saw a need and we leaned into our friends in marketing to teach us how to do it. If you look at how marketing sells a product or service, it certainly does talk about those strengths, benefits, and features and it’s a transactional thing because anyone who can afford the product, we would gladly sell it to.

It is quite a different proposition in employer branding when, as Bryan said, we’re rejecting 99% of the candidates who apply. There is a very real risk to our brand for every declined candidate who doesn’t have a stellar experience. So, it is something that we want to start to manage more closely as we get smarter about the repercussions and implications of this body of work.

The other thing I see is this set it and forget it. There is a swath of brands out there that have invested in building an employer brand but then they don’t activate it. They don’t quite know what to do with it and while it might be activated with candidates, it is not activated as strongly internally as it could be. When used right, your employer brand is not only externally facing but it is an internal engagement tool. I have seen it used to great effect to re-recruit their existing workforce, to remind them why they should show up every single day and why it’s worth putting in a discretionary effort.

Human Stories

Nikki Van Noy: That actually leads into something I wanted to talk to you about, which is if you guys are seeing this have an impact on retention rates or any other statistics that might be relevant here?

Bryan Adams: Yeah absolutely, as soon as organizations complete an employer brand for the first time, they might download a vanilla employer brand dashboard of new metrics that they introduced to the organization, things that the organization hasn’t measured or cared about since the conception of the organization. It is really important to find metrics that matter that move the dial and add value to the organization.

Actually, we have boiled it down to two main metrics. The first one, from an attraction point of view, like we said a number of times it is not volume, really, it’s the percentage of valued applicants that you are receiving and how that’s changing over time. Because it is possible that you might reduce the overall volume of applicants coming and flowing into your funnel on a weekly-monthly basis, but if the percentage of valued applicants is going up that tells you that your smart filter is actually working.

Then internally, we talked about retention for years and it’s always been something an organization works hard to improve, but actually, in this day and age, it is not good enough. If you’ve got a thousand-person organization and a hundred people are leaving every month then you’ve got 90% retention and that sounds like a problem.

But let’s look at that–if 100 of those people you wouldn’t re-recruit at all then suddenly it is not so much of a big problem. However, if those same 100 people on a monthly basis were all your top performers and rising stars then you have a catastrophe. So actually, rather than retention, we should be looking at regrettable loss. How are we using employer brand to re-recruit the talent we’ve got and remind them why they’re there?

Charlotte’s got a great story of how she’s done some amazing investigation work over the years to discover really human-specific stories of how products of the organization have impacted people’s lives. She has and tracked them down and brought them in and told their personal stories. When she tells a story, it gives you goosebumps, and it’s not difficult to imagine the difference it would make to an engaged employee base. I don’t know whether you want to tell that story Charlotte? I love it every time you tell that story.

Nikki Van Noy: Charlotte, you have to tell that story now.

Charlotte Marshall: Okay, so it was the early 2010s and I was working for a large life science organization that was one of the toughest cultures I had ever been a part of. The chief people officer at the time had come to the internal communication team and given us an engagement challenge, if we could raise engagement, I think five points over the next two years. We took after finding the stories that would connect with people on a human level and some of the stories I encountered changed me forever as just a human in terms of what a good story can do.

Working for a life science brand obviously there was a lot of life-saving implication to the work going on. So, one of the stories that I found was a man who had been wrongly accused of a crime and he was incarcerated and falsely imprisoned for 11 years. During the course of his incarceration, DNA analysis became possible and the company was part of creating those DNA instruments.

He had written to The Innocence Project and eventually they took on his case, found his evidence, got it tested for DNA and found out that he in fact had not committed this crime. He was exonerated.

Of course, this is an amazing story and my market dev team told me about it and I said, “Great, I would like to use this for recruitment,” and they said, “Oh, we can’t. We don’t actually know with confidence that it was one of our products. We own 80% of the market but it could have been a competitor’s product.”

I said, “All right, well then do you have the phone number of the lab that tested his evidence?” Within two phone calls and within two weeks we identified that it was the AB profiler plus, which is one of our legacy products and it was in fact one of our stories.

So, what I did was I found Herman Atkins and I flew him out to our headquarters in Southern California and I asked him to speak at an all-employee meeting that was being broadcast to 10,000 people around the world and about 2,000 people live.

What I didn’t know that day was that the company was going through such an economic winter that there was really nothing positive that was going to come out of that all-employee meeting. Our CEO used to open every single meeting with a joke and as he took that stage that day, he said that he wasn’t going to start with a joke today because there was nothing funny about what we were facing and if we didn’t get it together, we wouldn’t survive as an organization.

Well, Herman was backstage with me listening to all of this and as he took the stage, he told the story about what it felt like to have his mother look at him with doubt in her eyes whether or not he had committed this crime, and then this deep admiration for the scientists who we had flown in who actually created the product that he got to show his gratefulness for because they gave him his life back. He thanked everyone in that room for giving him his life back.

He was a 3rd-year law student who was going back to school to dedicate his life to helping other people who had been wrongly convicted of crimes to get a second chance. He said, “I don’t know what’s going on. I heard your CEO say in his opening remarks that you guys need to get your head back in the game.”

That started gosh, one of probably 30 stories that were brought to life for the next couple of years of my career where I had just this hunger for the stories that matter.

I was tracking people down and inviting them to share with employees and as I flew out to one of our lowest engaged sites later that year, I was interviewing an employee who told me how much he hated his boss, he hated his team, he hated his life. He didn’t really hold much back but he said, “You know what? I still give my all every single day” and I said, “Well why is that? Why do you still work here and why do you still care so much?”

He said, “Well I know that the work that we do matters. I have a daughter who has special needs and the products that I create day in and day out on this manufacturing line wouldn’t negatively impact this company, they impact someone like my daughter. I am here to make sure people have a better tomorrow.” It was those kinds of testimonials that we saw take shape after sharing and reminding people why their work really matters.

Now that is in a very tough culture. Some other cultures I have worked in have not had that challenge, but the same source of pride and admiration. It flows quite freely when you start to unearth those stories.

Nikki Van Noy: That is powerful and also, you’re like an investigative journalist. I am sort of stunned after that story. Thank you for prompting that Bryan.

Bryan Adams: Yeah and if that isn’t an example of giving that principle in action, you know I don’t know what is because here is a disengaged group of employees reminded that, in this tough time, in these harsh realities, here’s why your work matters. Immediately that employee base is lifted because they are acknowledged, they are appreciated, they are inspired. You know it is like what we were talking about before, that is the type of story. There are the ingredients that were needed to instill passion and to illicit pride from any employee base.

Charlotte Marshall: I think engagement did go up 11%, 11 points within the last year spent because every monthly meeting we were flying in people that could share a story like Herman’s.

Nikki Van Noy: That is incredible, absolutely incredible. I think even with all of these improvements in culture, we can sometimes lose sight of the humanity that is the constitution of workplaces. That is such a great reminder of that.

Bryan Adams: Absolutely.

Nikki Van Noy: So, before I let you guys go, I want to switch gears here a little bit. Obviously, this book is geared toward employers, but I am assuming that you guys have some insights that could be interesting or valuable to job seekers. Do you have anything that you can share that might help job seekers more easily identify the places where they should be working and where they will thrive the most?

Bryan Adams: I think if the average job-seeker reads this book, they’ll probably get an immediate insight into what questions they should be asking and what answers they should be searching for in order to better assess whether they have what it takes to thrive in the organization. Essentially the big question on a job seeker’s mind is actually, “Do I have what it takes to thrive? How am I going to feel? Will I be accepted, and would I belong? Can I add value and make an impact? Does my personal purpose align with the purpose of the organization?”

So, this book it is calibrated and pointed very firmly at an industry that we’re trying to change and bring around to our way of thinking, but it definitely equips the average job-seeker and points them in the direction of exactly how to assess organizations as to whether they’d be a good match or not. Nowadays people are interviewing the companies as much as the companies are interviewing them. So, it’s exactly how it should be.

Nikki Van Noy: Excellent. Again, the book is Give and Get: Employer Branding. Charlotte and Bryan, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you give listeners an idea of where they can find you outside of the book?

Charlotte Marshall: Absolutely, you can find us both on LinkedIn. You can find us on giveandget.net and you can find Bryan also at ph-creative.com.